Capitalism in space: SpaceX this morning successfully reused a Falcon 9 first stage for the eleventh time, putting 46 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The 2022 launch race:
7 SpaceX
2 China
2 Russia
1 Virgin Orbit
1 ULA
1 India
1 Europe (Arianespace)
1 Northrop Grumman
Capitalism in space: Northrop Grummann yesterday used its Antares rocket to successfully launch its Cygnus freighter to ISS.
This fact about this Cygnus is important:
This is the first Cygnus mission featuring enhanced capabilities to perform a re-boost to the space stationโs orbit as a standard service for NASA; one re-boost is planned while Cygnus is connected to the orbiting laboratory.
In other words, Cygnus has been enabled to replace the boost capability that the Russians and Japanese provided.
The 2022 launch race:
6 SpaceX
2 China
2 Russia
1 Virgin Orbit
1 ULA
1 India
1 Europe (Arianespace)
1 Northrop Grumman
Getting out while the getting is good: Chamath Palihapitiya, who has been chairman of Virgin Galactic’s board since it went public in 2019, suddenly announced today that he has resigned from the company.
Palihapitiya’s SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, took Virgin Galactic public in October 2019. The company’s stock has faced volatile trading since then โ climbing above $60 a share in the months ahead of Sir Richard Branson’s test spaceflight, but it recently fell below its public debut price on news of a further delay in the start of commercial service.
The now-former chairman sold his personal Virgin Galactic stake in early 2021 that was worth over $200 million at the time. But he indirectly owns about 15.8 million shares through Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings.
Like Richard Branson, Palihapitiya sold the majority of his stock when the price was high, about the time the company flew its first and only passenger flight in July, with Richard Branson on board. His exit now suggests he wants out before the company’s dismal future prospects become obvious.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The Hubble Space Telescope science team today released the photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, of the interaction of three galaxies, the larger two of which look like they are hugging each other.
This galaxy triplet is estimated to be about just under 700 million light years away. It was taken as part of a program aimed at producing high quality images of strange looking galaxies.
Using Hubbleโs powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys, astronomers took a closer look at some of the more unusual galaxies that volunteers identified. The original Galaxy Zoo project was the largest galaxy census ever carried out and relied on crowdsourcing time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies. The project achieved what would have been years of work for a professional astronomer in only 175 days and has led to a steady stream of similar astronomical citizen science projects. Later Galaxy Zoo projects have included the largest ever studies of galaxy mergers and tidal dwarf galaxies, as well as the discovery of entirely new types of compact star-forming galaxies.
If you want to do some real science, you should definitely check out the Galaxy Zoo webpage. Anyone can join in, using images produced by the Victor Blanco 156 inch (4 meter) telescope in Chile to find cool stuff that needs closer examination using better telescopes like Hubble.
The Gehrels-Swift orbiting space telescope has returned to full science operations, after engineers determined the shut down on January 18th was caused by the failure of one reaction wheel and uploaded software allowing the telescope to function using only its remaining five gyroscopes.
In the last two decades satellite engineers have developed a range of software to allow spacecraft to point with acceptable accuracy using as few as two gyroscopes, even one in some circumstances. Thus, Gehrels-Swift has significant margin with five working reaction wheels.
Capitalism in space: Lunar Outpost, which is building a mini-rover that will fly on the private Intuitive Machines lunar lander scheduled for launch later this year, has now partnered with the company Copernic to sell the rover’s spare payload space to whoever wants to buy it.
Lunar Outpost of Evergreen, Colorado, is preparing to send a 10-kilogram robotic rover to the moon on an Intuitive Machines lander and SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket later this year. While the landerโs primary payload is a Nokia LTE 4G technology demonstration, Lunar Outpost is working with Copernic Space to sell an additional 3.475 kilograms on its first Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP).
…Copernic Space created the online platform to streamline the process of buying and selling space-related products and services like shares in a space startup, satellite sensor tasking or payload space. By applying blockchain technology, Copernic Space converts space assets into non-fungible or digital tokens, which are designed to be bought and sold online.
For the next 11 days, Lunar Outpost is selling a gram of payload capacity on its MAPP Lunar Rover for $4,250. The minimum order is 100 grams. In April, the public sale begins, allowing people to buy or sell as little as one-hundredth of a gram of payload space.
It appears purchase will be by using blockchain currency, and appears to also involve the purchase of “non-fungible or digital tokens”.
Normally I would applaud this effort, but the addition of these digital tokens makes the sale process seem less than straightforward and even a little suspicious. What exactly are customers buying? And what exactly will go to the Moon? Copernic’s website describes this process, but even there its seems exceedingly vague and uncomfortably like a con game.
From what I can gather, customers who buy payload space can use Copernic to create these non-fungible tokens which can then be resold to others to make back some of the cost. I wonder, however, why would anyone buy these tokens in the first place. As far as I can tell, they have absolutely no value in the real world.
Capitalism in space: After several weeks of delay due to unstated technology issues, the Japanese company Astroscale has begun maneuvers in its test to see if its robot satellite can approach from a distance and capture a target satellite acting as orbital space junk.
The Japanese startup has started moving its 175-kilogram servicer spacecraft closer to the 17-kilogram client satellite ahead of deciding whether to restart the demonstration, Astroscale said in a social media post.
According to Astroscale, it has made โgood progress in working through solutions to the anomalous spacecraft conditions that we identified with ELSA-d,โ or End-of-Life Services by Astroscale-demonstration.
The company did not disclose the nature of the issue, when it could restart the mission or the distance between the two objects.
That no specifics have been stated, and that the company also says it is “keeping regulators and key partners updated on our status,” suggests that maybe the problem wasn’t technical, but bureaucratic. Maybe some Biden administration functionary got nervous, and demanded Astroscale slow down the test so that he or she could review what was happening.
This would not surprise me in the least, though I admit it is nothing more than some wild speculation.
Capitalism in space: Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s CEO, declared yesterday that the company has more space tourist customers than it can fly on its single New Shepard suborbital spacecraft, and wants to build more to handle the potential traffic.
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin flew 14 people to space in 2021, and CEO Bob Smith on Thursday said the firm needs to build more of its New Shepard rockets to meet the demand from the space tourism market. “I think the challenge for Blue at this point is that we’re actually supply limited,” Smith said, speaking at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington.
If true, this is good news, for the suborbital tourist market. It means there might be enough business for both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic to survive and make money, at least for a few years.
At the same time, Smith’s focus seems wildly misplaced, since it is the orbital market, not the suborbital space tourism market, where the future lies, as well as the really big money. Putting tourists on short ten minute hops to space might be exciting right now, but very soon it will seem very passe, as more and more orbital tourist flights take place.
I wonder if anyone asked Smith about the status of Blue Origin’s orbital rocket, New Glenn, which remains untested and years behind schedule, all because.the BE-4 engine that will power it is also years behind schedule. It would be nice to know when the first flightworthy engines will be delivered to ULA, as well as installed on New Glenn. Those engines were promised more than a year ago, and are still not a reality.
Capitalism in space: The proposed spaceport planned for the Shetland Islands in the United Kingdom is now delayed because a government planning committee has failed to put it on its schedule for discussion.
A spokesperson for SaxaVord UK Spaceport said the SIC has now confirmed to them that the application will not be on the agenda on Monday, and has given no clear indication when it will be discussed.
…The councilโs development director Neil Grant said: โThis is a complex planning application and recently there has been great deal of information flowing between the applicant, ourselves and statutory consultees. We are working hard to ensure this is presented to the planning committee for a decision as soon as possible.โ
So there will be no confusion among my readers, this proposed spaceport is not the same as the Sutherland spaceport in Scotland, presently under construction. It is a competitor, and until recently faced opposition from environmentalists, who have now withdrawn their objections.
My heart be still! The European Space Agency (ESA) has decided to create a committee to study the concept of building a European manned capsule so that it will no longer be dependent on either the U.S. or Russia to get its astronauts into space.
Aschbacher said a draft mandate for the new advisory group will be presented to ESA members at a March meeting of the ESA Council, with the goal for the group to start working immediately thereafter. The committee will prepare an interim report in time for the ministerial meeting in November, with a final report by next spring.
โIt is clear that this group has to be independent and comprising mostly non-space experts,โ he said, โbecause we really would like to look at various aspects of society from an economic point of view, a historical point of view, a geopolitical point of view.โ That means including people such as artists and philosophers in the group to look at various aspects of exploration beyond science and technology. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words illustrate the empty PR nature of this committee. It will not result in any European manned spacecraft at all. Instead, it will spend more than a year talking a lot about the wonders of space, and then produce a report repeating how wonderful space is and how Europe must be there.
The result? ESA will have wasted a year and not gotten itself one iota closer to having its own manned spacecraft.
If this hollow effort was the exception to the rule for Europe, there might be hope some political pressure could get the committee reformed and actually include engineers to develop a real design. That hope is in vain, however, because this is how Europe and ESA does everything. By the time ESA produces the first designs of this capsule, probably five to six years hence, it will be so out-of-date that building it would be a joke.
In a larger sense, this absurd committee and the top management at ESA and in the European Union that proposed it illustrate the overall bankruptcy of modern civilization’s entire management class. The people running governments worldwide are generally all do-nothing idiots, who talk a lot, waste a lot of money for their own aggrandizement, impose taxes and regulations on everyone else that makes the lives of ordinary people a misery, and fail in almost every project they undertake. We need only look at their panicked, dishonest, and failed global response to the Wuhan flu in the past two years for a prime example.
The official intellectual class that is running our governments worldwide are bankrupt. They need to be fired.
Capitalism in space? Despite negative assessments of the project by its own bureaucracy, the European Union has decided to move forward on a proposal to build its own broadband satellite constellation.
The boardโs negative score was based on several factors, including a lack of โanalytical coherenceโ about why the proposed constellation is the best solution to the problems it is intended to address about broadband access and secure communications, use of a โpredetermined technical solutionโ that isnโt specified and a lack of a timetable. The board also raised concerns about the validity of the data the commission used to back the proposed constellation as well as climate impacts from deploying it.
According to E.U. rules, an impact assessment must receive a positive opinion from the Regulatory Scrutiny Board for it to proceed. If it receives a negative opinion twice, only the commissionโs Vice-President for Inter-institutional Relations and Foresight, Maroลก ล efฤoviฤ, can allow the initiative to proceed.
That was the case for the broadband constellation. โBecause of the political importance of this Programme, the urgency of action and having the additional clarifications and evidence viewed as satisfactorily addressing the identified shortcomings and suggested specifications of the Regulatory Scrutiny Board, the Commission โ also in the light of the agreement by the Vice-President for Inter-Institutional Relations and Foresight โ has considered it opportune to proceed with the Programme,โ the legislative proposal stated.
Except for a commitment to spend $6.8 billion, at the moment the proposal includes few details, including the type and number of satellites, what frequency they would use, what orbits they would be in, and who would build and launch them.
Based on the typical time schedule for other recent European projects, do not expect this constellation to launch for at least another decade, at which time it will be obsolete.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory last week experienced a loss of power that caused engineers to put the science instruments on the space telescope into safe mode while they investigate the problem.
No further information is presently available.
Chandra has been in orbit since 1999, and is now on an extended mission through 2025. It would be a great tragedy if it failed now, just as the infrared Webb telescope is about to begin operations. The two space telescopes are complementary.
